What happens when the immune system attacks the brain? Stanford doctors investigate

The first time he flew into a psychotic rage, Paul Michael Nelson was only 7 years old. He stabbed at a door in his family's home with a knife, tore at blankets with his teeth, spoke in gibberish. His very worried parents, Paul and Mary Nelson, rushed him to their local emergency room, where the medical staff thought that perhaps the little boy had simply had a bad temper tantrum.

But his rages got worse. Over the weeks and months that followed the first March 2009 emergency room visit, as Paul Michael cycled in and out of psychiatric hospitals, his parents and doctors struggled to understand what was wrong. Finally, they came to a surprising conclusion: Paul Michael had an autoimmune disease. His immune system appeared to be attacking his brain.

As strange as the case seems, the Nelsons are far from alone. As I describe in a recent story for Stanford Medicine magazine, Paul Michael was the first of more than 70 children who have been evaluated at a new clinic at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford for pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, a disease (or, more likely, a group of diseases) that doctors are still working to define. The suddenness and severity of the syndrome are frightening. Healthy children abruptly begin to show psychiatric symptoms that can include severe obsessive-compulsive behavior; anorexia; intense separation anxiety at the thought of being away from a parent; deterioration in their school work, and many other problems. From my story:

“In some ways, it’s like having your kid suddenly become an Alzheimer’s patient, or like having your child revert back to being a toddler,” says Jennifer Frankovich, MD, clinical assistant professor of pediatric rheumatology at the School of Medicine and one of the clinic’s founders.

“We can’t say how many kids with psychiatric symptoms have an underlying immune or inflammatory component to their disorder, but given the burgeoning research indicating that inflammation drives mood disorders and other psychiatric problems, it’s likely to be a large subset of children and even adults diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses,” says Kiki Chang, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

To shed light on the disease, Frankovich and Chang are working with scientists from around the world on defining the parameters of the illness and launching urgently-needed research. In a special issue of the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology that published online this month, the researchers lay out several aspects of the problem. The Stanford experts are co-authors of a scientific article describing how doctors should evaluate children with the disease, known by its acronym, PANS. Other researchers have written about disordered eating in PANS and given a detailed description of the disease phenotype.

Recognition and treatment of the disease are still an uphill battle, but the growth of research efforts is a hopeful step. As Frankovich says at the conclusion of the Stanford Medicine story, "We cannot give up on this. There are so many of these cases out there."